After the Wiesn is before the Wiesn: Visitor Experiences and Meaning-Making at Munich’s Oktoberfest

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores how the heterotopic and liminal dimensions of Munich’s Oktoberfest produced differentiated visitor experiences, and how spatial, temporal, ritual, and social dynamics mediate feelings of authenticity, communitas, and belonging across visitor types. Adopting an interpretivist, social constructionist approach, the thesis combines semi-structured interviews with 15 participants and covert participant observation at the 2025 festival. Analysis reveals Wiesn as a heterotopic space full of contradictions: simultaneously an authentic folk festival and commercialized spectacle, a site of liberation and stratification. While embodied rituals, collective emotions, and temporal rhythms foster extraordinary experiences and recollective value, communitas is mediated by forms of capital and by gender. The central theoretical contribution is the concept of stratified communitas, which challenges the universalizing language of liminality theory, particularly its neglect of gender as a structural mediator of liminal experiences. The Five-Loop Model of Festival Visitor Experiences is proposed to represent how visitors experience and make meaning at festivals. Findings contribute to debates on authenticity, belonging, and identity in festival and tourism studies, with practical implications for inclusive festival design.